4th Estate £8.99 pp170

Not many books about the European Union are fun to read. This one is; and, more than that, it tells the political story of the EU better than any other I know. This is not a surprise from Mark Leonard, who is something between an infant prodigy and an enfant terrible in the world of foreign affairs. When he was running the Foreign Policy Centre their parties were the only ones worth going to.

The EU is so difficult to understand because it does not fit into our established categories. It is not a state; it is neither a federation nor a confederation. Leonard makes the striking comparison with the Visa Company, whose logo appears on half a billion credit cards though it has only 3,000 employees. Authority, initiative, decision-making and profits belong to the 21,000 financial institutions that own Visa. It is an enabling organisation rather than an old-style corporation. This is not a bad way to imagine the EU: a collective owned by the members, enhancing their powers rather than appropriating them.

Something of the same idea is present in the chapter entitled The European Rescue of National Democracy, borrowing from Alan Milward’s book, The European Rescue of the Nation State. This argued that the EU enabled governments to rationalise industrial and agricultural policies. Leonard makes the bolder claim that the EU has saved democracy, by enabling European countries to operate effectively in a globalised world. Today it is simply no good pretending that a small or medium-sized country can run a meaningful external policy: when it comes to international negotiations or setting European rules, Ireland has a voice; Norway in practice has none. Membership of the EU means not a handing over of power to Brussels but a net increase in effective power.

This is the opposite of the usual moan about the democratic deficit. This concept represents a curious alliance between members of the European parliament, who would like more power, and those who attack the EU as a faceless bureaucracy. The trouble is that if you introduced democracy along nation-state lines you would make the EU into some kind of superstate, which is exactly what the eurosceptics (rightly) abhor. Actually, if voter turnout is anything to go by, the EU seems to suffer from a democratic surplus as far the average citizen is concerned.

Sometimes the energy of this book leads the author towards exaggeration. The title, for example. Europe is not going to run the 21st century. Nor will anyone else, not even America — which Leonard writes off a little too easily. It is true that being the greatest military power in history is not the same as having political control or even influence in critical areas. That is because we live in a democratic era. With luck the 21st century will be run by the people of the many different countries; that is what democracy is about. Where Leonard is right is that, if we are even luckier, those countries will find ways of working together that preserve autonomy but enable cooperation, as the EU does, through the spread of a legal framework in some areas and of a political framework in others. It is law that enables competition and politics that enables cooperation.

Leonard may be too optimistic about “Europe at 50”, an EU with double its present membership. It is true that Europe grew from six to 15 and became more effective in the process. But each enlargement is a leap in the dark: you cannot function at 25 as you did at 15, nor at 50 as you did at 25. And the fact that you made the adjustment successfully last time does not prove you will do so again. The EU has a strong record of (eventually) learning from failure: the big question for the future is how well it copes with success.

This book says rather little about the failures and difficulties. It doesn’t explain the flaws of a system where nobody seems to be in charge, nor the quarrelling between institutions that results from this (admittedly less dangerous than quarrelling between states), nor the difficulties of working without a single administrative culture. Nor does Leonard discuss the time taken to reach compromises or the ambiguity and omissions of the results, or the near impossibility of keeping anything secret. But speed, secrecy and decisiveness are the virtues of military organisations; and the world that he envisages is no longer dominated by the military. If he is right — and we must all hope he is — then the civil virtues of law and compromise (the EU’s strengths) may mean that Europe will indeed be equipped to run not the whole century but at least the European part of it.

Robert Cooper is a British diplomat working for Javier Solana, the secretary- general of the Council of the EU. The views expressed here are personal. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century is available at the Books First price of £7.64 plus 99p p&p on 0870 165 8585

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